Saturday, April 15, 2006

Taking the first one that comes along

As I mentioned, last night was all about seeing Suna and her bellydancing.

I couldn't help wonder how she's doing with dating these days. A friend of the Princeton crowd is visiting from Asia this week. Because her graduate school training was paid for by the government she is required to return and "pay back" the costs by working for a set period of time. It's either double the amount of time or three times the money. In this particular situation that apparently translates into 20 YEARS or 1 MILLION dollars (US)!

To make the situation even more complicated she still dating the man she met in grad school. Uh, they both know she can't move back here (not unless she wins the lottery or something). Suna immediately commented how she need to speak alone with her about this. "I did this long distance thing... " she said with a very cautionary tone.

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Later, Suna gave me a ride over to the karaoke bar. She asked me what happened with KT and I recalled that she had left on Wednesday evening before the story began. I gave her a quick synopsis and my position on the situation. She agreed.

I then asked her about her dating situation and whether there was anything happening with Diamond. She said she's definitely interested, but that friends have been encouraging her to still get on Match.com. They do want her to just accept the first boy that comes along. She joked about how it would be nice to simply date him for several years until they break up. (Aww... a little dating apprehension.) She recognizes why her friends want her to explore a little more and choose rather than take what comes. It seems like we women tend to do this more than men.

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I had lunch on Friday with a male colleague of mine, Penn. I am temporarily working with him on a big project. He wanted to spend lunch with me to make sure I'm doing okay. Things are getting quite depressed at work with good people resigning and just general malaise from some bad events last year.

I told him pretty honestly that if I was more focused on my career, I probably would be trying to leave the company. But for now, I'm happy with my work and my co-workers because it's not the number one thing in my life.

As we returned from lunch, I mentioned the reason I ran out on his meeting last Tuesday was because I had a date. When he asked how it went I said that it might just be a case of friends. Penn thought back to his own days of being single. He said there was a time when he was so focused on work that it wasn't on his mind. Then he realized he just wanted to put himself out there and generally date people. He wasn't ready to get into anything serious, he just wanted to get his feet wet. It took him sometime to feel ready to be serious about someone. He once commented how his mother said, "Everyone you bring home is nice, just pick one!"

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